Hi Mike,
Some time ago there was the possibility to play all words in random order. Would it be possible to bring this back?
I’m learning a language with a smaller Fast Track at the moment, and am contemplating how to go on after finishing it. Getting back to 1000 most common seems lame to me.
second this request.
That used to be my default option for playing new sentences, too.
Thanks for the feedback! We’re considering two options:
Making the Random Collection available for all language pairings. The Random Collection is, like the name suggests, just a collection of randomly selected sentences. There can be a lot of overlap with the Fast Track and Most Common Words collections, however, which is why the Random Collection is not available language pairings that have a Fast Track and Most Common Words collections at the moment. But it might be time to bring it back!
We’re also thinking of adding a mode where you can play sentences at random and they’re added to a collection as you play them for review later. I think this option might be a better fit for what you’re looking for. The downside is that you wouldn’t be able to play new sentences offline - you’d only be able to download the collection and review sentences already added offline. Also not sure how we’ll handle stats just yet - it may be this collection always has 100% playing since it would only contain sentences you’ve already played.
Curious to hear what you think of those two options, and please let me know if anything’s unclear / you have any questions.
Two related follow up thoughts:
For 1. above, we might end up doing this any way as we start adding more sentences and adding Fast Track and Most Common Words collections for language pairings that currently don’t have these collections. If you’ve only played the Random Collection, we don’t want your progress to disappear, and at the moment we don’t think that progress should be “transferred” to the new Fast Track / Most Common Words collections.
And for 2., an alternative or addition to selecting from all sentences to play randomly is to make it “adaptive” - you play a sentence and can then click a word in the sentence to play more sentences like it - either containing the same word or possibly even the same part-of-speech. Not sure how doable this option is just yet, but it could be fun/interesting/useful, and I’ve found myself doing something similar when looking up words in a dictionary - I’ll look up a word, see an example sentence, then look up a word from that sentence, and so on.
Curious to hear what you think of the latter two as well. Thanks again!
@mike What did “Play All” do before the update? I thought it let you play random sentences from all the Most Common Word collections, with your progress counted towards whichever collection the sentences came from, and points counted normally. Something like that sounds good to me if it’s doable.
I second kadrian’s words.
We don’t start from scratch for all languages. When you get this random mode you get closer to how you meet words in real life. Any given text will have high-frequency and low-frequency words.
I noticed I was improving way better on my stronger languages when I was playing them random. The early levels are easy, the higher levels tend to be too specific and the middle ones aren’t enough and we would have to curate these words ourselves with the risk of always leaving something behind.
Going further, my Greek and Russian are probably intermediate. The Russian deck is particularly huge. When I played it random, I could have access to a wide range of words. Now I have to run erratically through the levels.
Whether this random mode will count towards the fast track is another issue. The fact is that it’s extremely relevant for natural language learning.
third kadrian’s suggestion. before the update I did this in portuguese a lot and it was nice to have a mix of common and rare words
Forth kadrian’s suggestion.
Thanks for all the feedback! If you go to the bottom of the Most Common Words collections on the web, you should now see an option to play all sentences from the Most Common Words collections randomly, essentially what @kadrian described above. We’ll likely eventually get this added to mobile app as well.
Great! This makes me wish for another feature, actually previously suggested by me:
It would be great to see which collection a sentence comes from, as a hint whether to look for a rare or a more commonly used word. That goes for reviews all well.
Here’s hoping this gets added to the app more soon than later!
That’s great news! Thanks mike for all the support.
I always do new sentences and reviews separately, so have “Max reviews per round when playing new sentences” set to zero.
Using the new Play function for randomly selected sentences, I get a mix of new sentences and reviews despite that setting.
This is probably because I’ve finished playing new sentences in several of the categories. The old Play All used to only choose sentences from categories where I had new sentences left to play.
This isn’t necessarily a problem, just thought I’d mention that randomising function seems to override the settings for playing new sentences vs reviews.
